On its face, this book would seem like a departure for Huggins. It’s about a huge financial scam being run by a mysterious conglomerate with shadowy figures at its heart; a group of unlikely heroes are set on the task of running the financial scam to ground and exposing the villains behind it. This sounds like a very different kind of thriller than Huggins’ usual turf, but fear not! The villains have hired an icepick wielding killer code-named Iceman to track down and murder those on their trail. Throw in a chess prodigy who also happens to be a crack shot with any weapon you throw at him and a badass female Israeli soldier and this book provides more bullet spraying than number crunching. It’s a good hundred pages too long, though, and it’s not nearly on the level of The Reckoning, the book in Huggins’ bibliography that it most resembles. It’s a fairly solid genre thriller, not much more. 2 ½ stars.
tl;dr – nominally about a financial scam, this book actually delivers a ton of action and gunplay, but the characters are lacking and it’s far too long for what it is: a potboiler. 2 ½ stars.